Like most Muslim Sisters, Fatma Abdel Hafez grew up within the Muslim Brotherhood's tightly knit networks. She was born to a father who spent six years in Gamal Abdel Nasser’s jails due to his affiliation with Egypt’s oldest Islamist organization. When she decided to marry, her husband came from the same circles. Her late father-in-law was a member of the Brotherhood’s Guidance Bureau.
For years before the revolution, Abdel Hafez was involved in promoting political awareness within the group’s Sisters division in her hometown of Beni Suef.
“My interest in public affairs developed spontaneously as I grew up,” Abdel Hafez says.
Soon Abdel Hafez may find a new platform to express her passion for politics. She is one of at least 70 women the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party (FJP) is fielding as candidates in the parliamentary elections set to begin on 28 November.
Who are the FJP’s women?
Like many female candidates, Abdel Hafez’s professional expertise is mainly in pedagogy and social work. For 16 years she has worked at a privately owned Islamic school in her city and been involved in the Brotherhood’s philanthropic activities.
Aside from holding rallies, Abdel Hafez's campaign also relies on the internet. Her Facebook page seeks to demonstrate her history of civic engagement, featuring pictures of her speaking at various conferences and updates of her local tours. In all photos, the parliamentary hopeful, who identifies herself on the social networking site as a proud Muslim, appears in a veil that reaches down to her waist.
If she wins, Abdel Hafez says she will focus on urgent issues that preoccupy most Egyptians. “For the time being, there is a need to fix the security situation and the economy,” says Abdel Hafez, a first-time candidate.
Some of her peers are making their second attempts at a parliamentary bid. Wafaa Mostafa Mashhour, the daughter of a former Brotherhood supreme guide, challenged a candidate from the ruling National Democratic Party (NDP) in the 2010 parliamentary elections for a seat allocated to women in Assiut.
“I chalked up a remarkable victory but the results were rigged at the end,” says the 58-year-old Islamic education pioneer. She relates the strength of her support base to her involvement in providing family and couples counseling for over 15 years in her hometown.
A conservative outlook
Not unlike their male counterparts, the FJP female candidates pledge to focus on various issues, including addressing the security vacuum, safeguarding people’s liberties, improving economic conditions by restructuring salaries, imposing a maximum wage and mending the education system.
On women’s issues, FJP female candidates seem to endorse a typical Islamist conservative agenda, which secularists believe perpetuates male supremacy. In an interview with the party’s daily newspaper Freedom and Justice, Azza al-Garf, the party’s 46-year-old candidate in Giza, said that if she wins, she will work toward reversing “women’s and children’s laws that were promulgated in the defunct [Mubarak] epoch and violate Islamic Sharia and human nature.”
That attitude might hit a nerve with many liberal feminists who suspect that the political ascent of Islamists in post-Mubarak Egypt will translate into regression in the realm of women's and children's laws.
Since Mubarak’s departure, some Islamist groups have expressed vehement opposition to laws that give women the right to divorce their husbands, criminalize female circumcision, give women the right to register their children even if the father is unknown and extend child custody age to 15. Liberal feminists suspect that Islamists will reverse these laws if they dominate parliament.
FJP candidates, mostly professional women, fully support the right to work, but with some conditions. “A woman has the right to go out as long as she does not violate Sharia commandments in her clothes and conduct,” says Mashhour, who says she hopes workplaces will impose Islamic dress rules ― presumably the veil ― on female employees.
Genuine belief or tactical move?
In recent weeks, the FJP electoral campaign has devoted particular attention to promoting its female candidates.
At least once a week, the party’s daily newspaper runs a profile of a female parliamentary nominee, highlighting her background and agenda. If there is one common theme in all these portraits, it is the interviewees’ attempts to defuse allegations that the Brotherhood has no genuine belief in women’s empowerment and that female candidates serve as window dressing for the party.
When asked to respond to claims that the Brothers are fielding many women out of necessity, since the new electoral law mandates that each party include a woman on its list, Garf called the claim “untrue.”
“If you look at the FJP female nominees, you will find that all of them are known for their social activities in their own areas. Such activities have been supported by the group and the party. So how could you say that they are fielded just for window dressing purposes?” she said.
But the specific placement of female candidates on the party’s electoral lists suggests the party may not be seriously betting on its female candidates’ success.
The FJP has posted 36 of its 46 lists set to compete for 332 seats of the parliament’s lower house. A female candidate appears in the top half of only seven lists. For the Shura Council, FJP female candidates appear at the bottom half of more than 50 percent of the party’s 30 lists.
On a separate occasion, FJP Secretary General Mohamed Saad al-Katatny said that candidates who appear on the bottom half of lists have little chance to win in a proportional representation system.
Female candidates refuse to assign any significance to their placements.
“We FJP members do not care about our ranking on the list because we do our job whether we make it to parliament or not,” says Abdel Hafez, who is fifth on a list of eight candidates in her district.
“I have a role to play, whether in parliament or outside parliament,” she adds.
Women are believed to constitute nearly 25 percent of Muslim Brotherhood members. In 2000, the group fielded its first female candidate for parliament to prove its departure from its early ideology, which prescribed women’s roles to looking after their children.
“The Muslim Brotherhood’s position on women is no different from that of the rest of the society; it is a traditional and conservative position,” says Khalil al-Anani, a political scientist at Durham University and an expert on the group.
According to a recent study by a local women’s advocacy group, the electoral lists of many parties showed a small role for women, either placing them toward the bottom of lists or excluding them completely.
The report shows that FJP policy is not drastically different from that of, for example, the well-established liberal Wafd Party. While women constitute 10 percent of the FJP-dominated Democratic Alliance lists, they take up no more than 15.4 percent of the Wafd’s lists, according to the report.
For Anani, the FJP nomination of dozens of female candidates remains more “a symbolic step rather than a reflection of the group’s belief in the importance of women’s political roles.”
The status of women within the Brotherhood remains “unhealthy and disturbed,” he said.
Muslim Sisters are still denied the right to vote in the 83-year-old organization's internal elections. Membership in the group’s supreme bodies has remained restricted to males, and women’s political roles have been limited to backing men in different elections by mobilizing voters.
Yet the party’s female candidates refuse to acknowledge these apparent aspects of discrimination. “Men and women are equal inside the group,” says Abdel Hafez. “Regardless of whether she votes or not [in internal elections], a woman’s view reaches [the leadership] and is taken into consideration.”
Denying women access to senior positions was more of a protective measure that aimed at sparing women the police harassment that key Brotherhood leaders were subjected to under Mubarak, argues Hafez.
For Anani, Abdel Hafez belongs to the conservative middle generation of the Brotherhood that voices no discomfort over the status quo. Younger Sisters have a more progressive outlook, he adds.
Earlier this year, Al-Masry Al-Youm spoke to some of the group’s ambitious young female activists that were heavily involved in the 18-day uprising.
They said that the status of women within the organization should be revisited and that Sisters should no longer be excluded from the group’s highest leadership bodies.
It remains to be seen if these young Sisters will be strong enough to change the Brotherhood's outlook.
